Education in India: Past, Present and the Future. Ideas, Policies and Initiatives

August 22, 2014

A new bill - the Tamil Nadu Establishment of Private Law Colleges (Prohibition) Act, 2014 (full text) - was introduced in the Assembly by the Tamil Nadu Government on July 30th. The objects and reasons for the bill are described by the government as follows (the emphasis on the key words below is mine):

The Government have taken a policy decision to establish adequate number of Government Law Colleges in the State in a phased manner, to impart legal education at affordable cost. The past experience reveals that private trusts/societies are not able to provide legal education at affordable cost to the economically and socially weaker sections and also not able to continue to run the law colleges successfully. The Government have, therefore, decided to prohibit the establishment of law colleges by the private persons in the State by undertaking legislation.

This raises some questions:

Is this bill arising out of ideological considerations (i.e. private provision is not good), or, is it arising in response to concerns felt/expressed by the public that they do not want private players to set up and run educational institutions? Or a very complex combination of both?

Does the government have the right to control citizens' access to education by determining what is the 'adequate' amount of supply and restricting supply beyond that? What if citizens' perception of 'adequate' is far higher than the government's?

Can the government insist that education must be provided to the public at a price not more than a certain price deemed by the government as 'affordable' to the public, irrespective of the costs incurred by the education provider?

What kind of criteria should the government use to determine if an educational institution is being run 'successfully' or not? Shouldn't the government make public such criteria/standards, so that educational institutions know the standards that they are expected to live up to?

Can the government 'prohibit' private parties from establishing educational institutions by law even if the private parties are willing to abide by all the rules and regulations imposed by the government on existing institutions, either government or private?

Isn't the proposal for this Act by the Tamil Nadu government an admission of their inability to properly regulate private Law Colleges that are not run 'successfully'? Are they throwing out the baby with the bathwater because of their inability to separate the private Law colleges that are run well from those that aren't run well, and deal with each appropriately?

August 07, 2014

Vimala Ramachandran of NUEPA gave an interesting talk* on why we have a learning crisis in our schools and what can be done. She also spoke on a range of topics including how Poland implemented education reform successfully (of which I knew nothing till now and want to find out more), whether PPPs can help, the need for political support for education reform in India and on the mother tongue as the medium of instruction.

Children aren’t able to read and comprehend. They have very little understanding of basic math and science concepts too.

Children memorise and reproduce but do not internalize or understand what they have learnt. They are not able to apply basic concepts to day to day tasks, whether at school or at home.

The biggest tragedy of all – children do not develop fluency in any language, be it their mother tongue, medium of instruction or English

Employers complain about skill shortages, poor quality of workers and low productivity due to poor schooling.

There is something very seriously wrong in education. We have not done things right, not just in government schools, but in private schools too.

Why are children having a problem learning?

Pupil teacher ratio can be as high as 1:60 when it shouldn't be more than 1:30

Teaching time is an issue. Teachers may come to school, but not teach. Middle class parents deal with this by teaching their kids themselves at home. But what can parents from poor, semi-literate communities do? Whatever inequality they come with into the school system, the inequality only increases.

Rote learning is an issue. Teachers are expected to finish the syllabus in a short time and so they force children to resort to rote learning.

RTE's No Detention policy is being interpreted as No Assessment policy upto class VIII.

Teachers are overloaded with inane administrative tasks. Even with something like CCE, they spend their time filling forms rather than teaching or evaluating children.

Testing and Assessments only test the memory of the child. What gets tested is what gets learnt and how it gets tested determines how it is learnt. Teaching to the test is common.

Assessment systems are becoming corrupt. When assessments are based on internal assessments, teachers inflate the marks for all children.

Importance of teachers.

Teachers matter the most. A good teacher without a school building is better than buildings without a teacher.

Teacher quality is not about qualifications, but the ability to connect with children

States are reducing the percentage score to pass in the RTE mandated Teacher Eligibility Test to enable more teachers to pass. In Bihar, in 1990, Laloo Yadav as Chief Minister decided that 12th class Pass is not required to be a teacher. He reduced it to not just 10th class Pass, but 10th class Fail! So from 1990-1996, a whole bunch of primary school teachers in Bihar who had themselves not finished class 10 were recruited to teach! The political compulsion of a govt job seems to be more important than ensuring that a teacher who is hired is of a good quality.

Lessons from Poland

Poland had many of the problems we have today, with their Soviet-era inefficient schooling system. But from 1999-2006, they initiated reforms and turned the system around. What did they do?

They made sure teachers had much more autonomy and freedom in the school. The teachers and schools were told they had to bring children up to a particular level by Class 8. The syllabus was decided by the government in terms of what would be the minimum learning requirement. From Classes 1-8, the basic requirement in Sci/Math/Lang or reading was strictly followed. Children were tested at the end of class 8. Teachers had a lot of freedom and autonomy to do what they wanted and how they wanted to do it. Teachers instead of following orders from above actually had to innovate and figure out how best to teach their children. Each school was actually a practicing laboratory.

They put in place qualification requirements for teachers and these qualifications were linked to a promotion path and the government provided continuing education opportunities.

They gave generous retirement packages for many of those teachers who weren't competent enough.

Poland had a dynamic education minister and a dynamic prime minister at that time. They felt that the single most important wealth that the country had was the people and they had to reform the education system. Only with political will, things get done.

What should be done to change things in India?

Move from just inputs, infrastructure and paper qualifications to actual functioning of the school system.

Change the way the education system is monitored. Look at what and how much children are learning, what and how teachers are teaching. Do they have the requisite facilities, knowledge and equipment to teach.

Reform teacher education. NCTE opened up teacher training institutions in 2004 resulting in a 500% increase in the number of Teacher Training Colleges. Everyone knows that people at NCTE made a lot of money by giving away licences to one-room teacher training colleges. Odisha alone has escaped the curse of mushrooming teacher training colleges because the Chief Minister said he did not want any low quality teacher training colleges. In the name of reform, accreditation, and quality assurance, we have done exactly the opposite. We must shut down all the teacher training colleges of poor quality and set up good quality teacher training colleges in parallel.

Introduce centralised assessments. In India the education community is very allergic to centralised assessments. The aim of centralised assessments are not assessment of the children, it is to assess the quality of the school or the average levels of learning of children. Most countries around the world have used a combination of tremendous school autonomy, where teachers can do what they want, how they want and combine it with some kind of centralised testing which becomes a quality benchmark.

I don’t know what that centralised quality test in India should be. The jury is still out on what we should do and how we should do it. But the fact remains that we have to start moving towards measuring outcomes.

At a summer training programme at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Education, IASE, in one of the better south Indian states, teachers were supposedly being trained on the National Curriculum Framework. They were taking turns to read out something from a paper. On enquiring, I was told each teacher was given four pages of the National Curriculum Framework to translate and read out. “It is an equitable distribution of honorarium,” the Principal told me!

Budgets are better spent by giving it to the school so that the school decides what kind of training they want for the teachers and make the principal responsible for that. As long as we don’t value and trust the knowledge that is there at the grassroots level, we will not be able to make much change. We as a country are so suspicious of teachers and the lower bureaucracy that we don’t want to give them any independence.

The only way to bring about change is by altering the rules and the behavior of the personnel who are in the system. With all due respect to teachers - I have worked with teachers for the past 25 years and deeply respect them - we have to have a system of humane as well as strict monitoring. The two have to go together. We need a mechanism to test what children are learning, how much they are learning and whether the learning is taking place across all children or not.

Vimala Ramachandran also responded to questions from the audience with her views on a range of topics.

On the need for political support for reform

Without political support it is impossible to bring about complete systemic reform of the education system. Civil servants have power only upto a point. Many civil servants have tried, but ultimately many of these things are larger political decisions.

The corporate and media communities in India must raise public opinion on the need for reform. My experience, and that of many who used to play an activist role in writing in the media about the problems about education, now find the media door shut. The media is full of sensationalism now. Both the corporate sector and the business community are most affected by the poor quality of people. These communities must do much more to raise awareness.

We have reached a crisis point. In many parts of the country if you want to set up a factory, it is difficult to find skilled people. You have to import them from other parts of the country. Even when you import them, the quality is poor and they need to be trained.

Neither the media nor the larger business community seem to doing anything. People like me going and talking to the education minister will really not help. It is only when there is a crescendo which comes from the media and the business community, will they start listening. At the moment the vested interest in not fixing it is very high. Rent seeking is very widespread in the education sector.

On the role of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs)

PPP as a model could be good. But I am yet to come across good PPP models which work over a period of time. PPPs over 1-2 years don’t work. In education, you have to stay for at least 10-15 years to see the results. Both sides have to stay committed. Corporate bodies change their priorities and Governments also renege on their commitments. There have been 2-3 big PPP models in North India where corporate houses have adopted 1000 govt schools and tried to work with them. But none of them want to stay for more than 4-5 years.

On restoring professionalism to the teaching profession

In many ways India and the U.S. are alike in many ways. In both countries the teaching profession has been badly demoralized. The professionalism of the teaching profession has to be restored. Govt teachers aren’t paid poorly. They are much higher than private teachers’ salaries. After the 6th pay commission, a young new teacher in UP or Rajasthan takes home 25000 rupees in the first job. A retiring teacher is taking home close to 80,000 to 100,000 rupees. So it isn’t as if they are being paid poorly.

We should create small professional circles of teachers so that the teachers’ professional identity is reinforced. We need to celebrate their professional identity. What happens when we give awards? We aren’t giving awards for the professional capability of the teacher. We are giving awards to those who are networked. We need to change the way we are treating our teachers.

On the good things happening in education in India

Although a lot of interesting initiatives are happening in different aspects of education in India, but when it comes to school education reform to overhaul the system, I don’t think we have done much in India so far. This is the main reason why there is a learning crisis. This crisis isn’t going to go away by doing small things. That is why I was talking about Poland.

Despite the system, there are thousands of teachers who are doing a spectacular job despite low pay, bad management etc.. They don’t look for recognition beyond what they get from their children. They are happiest when their children do well. That is the ultimate recognition for them.

On the perception that private schools are better than government schools

Rama Baru had done a study. She says the benchmark of quality is always the government. Wherever the govt school quality is very bad, the private school is just one notch above. Govt institutions do set the standards. They can set both low standards and high standards. The average private schools that poor, lower middle class send their children are not significantly better than the govt schools. It is the dysfunctionality of the govt schools that actually drives people out.

I don’t think cream of the society is going to private schools. People who have money are going to private schools. People who don’t have money are going to govt schools. Amongst those going to govt schools, there will be lots of cream. The only thing is we aren’t teaching them well. We aren’t investing in them. If we can teach children sincerely and give them opportunities, I am quite sure a lot of cream will come out of the govt schools too.

On the mother tongue being the medium of instruction

Education in the mother tongue is the way to go. That is very important. But the reason why parents are pulling their children out of govt schools is due to the non-availability of English medium education in government schools.

You know what Jammu & Kashmir has done? By an Act of govt they have converted all govt schools to English medium schools and the teachers don’t have the capacity to teach in English. We do these kinds of silly things. "Ok, people, you want English medium? From tomorrow all schools will be English medium."

Aside: N. Murali (Co-Chairman of Kasturi & Sons Limited, owners of The Hindu) is part of the committee that organised this talk. Apparently he was one of the students of Kuruvila Jacob, the erstwhile headmaster of Madras Christian College Higher Secondary School in Chennai, in whose memory this talk was organised. While delivering the vote of thanks at the end of the talk, Murali thanked the media for being present and exhorted them to report the enlightening and provocative talk and raise the level of consciousness to drive home the crisis that's staring us in the face.

In the podcast, we talk about a wide range of issues relating to school choice as outlined below. The time location of each broad topic within the audio podcast is mentioned below, for those who may want to jump to a specific point in the podcast.

00.03.00 - Explaining school choice to the layman.

00:06:50 - What would a parent need to do to benefit from school choice?

00:09:55 - What are the policy changes that would be required to implement school choice?

00:12:30 - On the scarcity of schools and difficulty in finding land for new schools especially in urban areas.

00:14:43 On the incentives for setting up new schools

00:17.39 On the freedom for schools to pick or choose the students they want to admit, social stratification in schools and fostering social mixing

00:27:04 On how to help parents make informed choices when selecting schools for their children

00:33:39 On dealing with switching costs for changing schools and the long time it takes to get feedback on the value added by a school.

00:36:42 Different school choice models

00:42:15 - The Charter School Model and its Indian variant

00:43:50 How has School Choice worked in other countries?

00:47:56 The prospects of implementing school choice in India and the receptivity for the idea of school choice.

00:54:52 On the role of grassroots political demand for improving education in India

November 19, 2011

Ashoka University, a new, private, non-profit university, is coming up in Sonepat, in Haryana, about 100 km north of Delhi. It will have a greater focus on the humanities and the liberal arts.

Forget about chasing foreign universities to invest in setting up universities in India - there's plenty of money available within India to fund manymanymoresuch credible non-profit private universities. The HRD Minister, Kapil Sibal, ought to be aggressively courting Indian philanthropists and investors first more than foreign universities.

A recent story in Business World throws some light on Ashoka University.

To recreate their own experience of learning at US universities, a group of professionals have come together to set up a new university of liberal arts in India. Well known names in Delhi and Mumbai circles — Ashish Dhawan (ChrysCapital), Sanjeev Bikhchandani (Naukri.com), Pramath Sinha (9.9 Mediaworx), NV “Tiger” Tyagarajan and Vineet Gupta (Jamboree), among others, are part of the International Foundation for Research and Education (IFRE).

To be located in the Rajiv Gandhi Education City in Kundli, Sonepat, across 25 acres, Ashoka University has sought “private university” status from the Haryana government and will be not-for-profit. A total of Rs 50 crore has been paid for the land, and the first phase is expected to cost about Rs 200 crore. The seed capital has been put up by the trustees, apart from donations from individuals.

Dhawan, senior managing director, ChrysCapital — who recently announced he was stepping down — plans to get into school education in a big way. However, with Ashoka University, the “idea is to offer a greater focus on languages, humanities and social sciences and to offer breadth rather than just depth as in the British system. Instead of studying one subject in depth for 3-4 years, the idea is to study many subjects across disciplines,” says Dhawan. He says it will offer courses and areas of study on the lines of universities such as Yale, Princeton and Amherst.

The International Foundation for Research & Education (IFRE) is a not-for-profit (Section 25 Company) that has been established with the vision to set up the Ashoka University – India’s first world class university. Over the last two years the team has grown in strength and added numerous academic and non-academic members from across the world to build an incomparable team of accomplished and committed individuals driven by the common motivation to give back to the country.

IFRE is also engaging with various reputed universities and schools in USA and Europe to firm up the scope for collaboration in building Ashoka University. A formal collaboration with the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) is already in place.

Initial funding commitments are already in place and the balance is being raised through endowments and debt.

Perkins Eastman, a globally renowned architectural firm, has been commissioned to design and develop a campus of the future and master planning is now under way. Construction is due to start in December 2011 and the campus is scheduled to be operational in July 2013. The application for grant of University status is under evaluation by the Goverment of Harayana. The University will start with two schools - Arts and Natural Sciences - in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania and other leading universities and schools of the world

The Young India Fellowship (YIF) seeks to groom young women and men like you who will lead India through the 21st century. The YIF will bring together 50 emerging leaders from around India in a one-year residential post-graduate programme in our nation’s capital. We will launch you on your leadership journey by opening your mind to a rich and diverse set of subjects and perspectives, delivered by some of the finest teachers of our generation from around the world. In this cross-flow of ideas and inspired learning, we will encourage and mentor you to discover your own self, to understand your personal values, strengths and aspirations, and create a process for you to build a broad life-plan that will align who you are with what you do in life. It really doesn't matter who you are: whether you graduated in the arts, science, engineering or commerce, we are committed to helping you get to where you want to

India has a large number of gifted and deserving students who are unable to avail of a high-quality learning experience from reputed institutions in India or abroad due to financial or other constraints. YIF will reach out to such students.

Leading undergraduate programmes in India seem to focus too early on professional and specialized courses that tend to stifle the abilities of talented young minds to explore different perspectives and avenues. YIF is designed to rekindle the desire to learn and explore. The perceived value of a broad-based liberal arts education at the undergraduate level has declined over the years. This has compromised a well-rounded learning experience at the higher education level in India. YIF wants to bring liberal arts to the centre-stage of a more holistic learning experience.

New ideas and possibilities get created at the boundaries of various disciplines. YIF aims to showcase the power of a multi-disciplinary learning environment created by some of the best and most inspirational teachers from India and the world.

Join 50 fellows from around India in the Founding Batch of Young India Fellows: study, work and learn with India’s best minds, carefully selected for their passion and leadership potential. Your batchmates will include engineers, scientists, accountants and lawyers, as well as those who have graduated with degrees in history, sociology, English literature, and the liberal arts.

Take classes in a range of subject areas that cover anthropology to ethics, life sciences to climate change, and art appreciation to entrepreneurship. You will develop insights and a worldview on a broad set of core disciplines as well as on some of the most complex global challenges we face.

Learn from some of the world’s most reputed faculty members drawn from the best universities and institutions around the world, and known for their outstanding teaching and research. The hand-picked YIF faculty will not only inspire you and help you learn how to learn, but also challenge you to be the best you can be.

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Receive a full scholarship of Rs 8 lakhs to cover the entire fee, boarding and lodging when you enter this prestigious fully-residential, full-time programme. And on completion, our experienced placement counselors will support and guide you in securing a career or higher-study opportunity in your area of choice.

For the first three years the YIF is being co-located at the Sri Aurobindo Center for Arts & Communication (SACAC) campus, Sri Aurobindo Society in New Delhi.

From the 3rd year onwards the programme will be moved to the upcoming Ashoka University campus at the Rajiv Gandhi Education City, Sonepat, which is being planned as the hub for institutions of higher learning in the NCR.

November 09, 2011

There were two talks on education, both focussing on incentives in school education, at the recently held Takshashila Shala in Chennai.

In the first talk, I spoke on what we can do differently to try and achieve the goal of providing a quality education for all children in India within the next ten years, something we haven't been able to do for the past 60 years.

I presented three ideas on what we could do differently. One of the ideas is a policy change for the Government to think about and the other two are something that we as civil society need to think about.

February 03, 2011

The second idea, that I talked about in my TED Talk titled Education for All - More of the Same or Something Different? on December 13th, 2010 at TEDx Kumaun is another policy change - to open up education to for-profit entities.

Today, by law, only the government or non-profit charitable trusts can run schools in India. Those in the educational policy establishment believe that a just society must provide state-funded and state-delivered education for all children for free and the private sector has no role to play. They are ideologically against for-profit education and believe that it is simply wrong to make a profit from education.

Another argument against private delivery of education is that all the major developed countries in the West educated their children almost entirely through public schools and so we must do the same. But to put that argument in perspective, we need to understand that all those countries had much smaller school-going populations to educate during their respective growth phases and more importantly they all had the luxury of time to be able to gradually bring different sections of society under the ambit of public schooling over decades. Today in India, we face challenges and circumstances that are very different from what the developed countries faced then. We have a school-age population that is many times that of the developed countries and we want to educate all of the children within the next five years, going by our current target of achieving education for all by 2015.

Having failed to educate all our children for the past 60 years through Government and non-profit schools alone, despite repeatedly setting targets, a good part of two generations of children have lost out on getting an education. If we had somehow been able to educate every child back in 1960 (the target that we set ourselves in 1950), India could have been in far better shape today in terms of the economy, society and as a result the polity as well.

We ought not to be dogmatic anymore by continuing to insist on education being run only by Government and non-profit entities. It is time to consider opening up education to for-profit entities and co-opting the private sector to help us achieve the national goal of educating every single child quickly.

Opening up education to for-profit entities should not be seen through an ideological lens. It is not a change of ideological stance from the Government as the ideal provider to that of not wanting a leading role for the Government and favouring the private sector as the panacea for everything. It is more a matter of pragmatism at this point of time to ensure we are able to address the national goal in a time-bound manner, through all means available, public and private, non-profit and for-profit. If we refuse to be pragmatic, we will be condemning a large part of yet another generation of children to a life without education or opportunity.

We have successfully co-opted the private sector to meet national goals in other sectors like telecom, housing, power, roads and health where for-profit companies are well accepted and are playing an important role. Without the help of the private sector's contribution in drastically expanding supply and improving quality in these sectors, we couldn't have provided these services to the hitherto unreached on such a large scale in such a short time. Although we have made progress, we still have a long way to go in providing these services to a large segment of the population. Issues like profiteering, corruption and poor quality of service by both Government and Private players do crop up in these sectors from time to time. We have put in place regulators who are tasked with addressing these issues and ensuring quality and preventing malpractices and the regulators will get better and better over time. The Private and the Government sectors have shown that they can work in tandem to achieve the national goals in these sectors in short periods of time.

It is time we did the same in the Education sector too. We must experiment with opening up education to for-profit entities to complement the efforts of the Government and non-profit sectors. Along with implementing the RSBY model in education, if we open up education to for-profit entities, and regulate them effectively, the anticipated increase in both Government and private investment in education can help us scale dramatically and achieve our goal of providing a quality education to every single child in the country at least by 2020.

January 31, 2011

Here is the first of four ideas that I talked about in my TED Talk titled Education for All - More of the Same or Something Different? on December 13th, 2010 at TEDx Kumaun

The first idea, a policy innovation, is to take a leaf out of the Government's own RSBY Project and replicate it to provide a quality education for every single child in the country.

A little over three years ago, the Government of India took up an extremely ambitious large scale challenge. The Govt wanted to provide free health care to all Below Poverty Line (BPL) persons across India, about 250-300 million of them, and launched the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) in October 2007.

How does the RSBY work?

The RSBY is a National Health Insurance Scheme run by the Ministry of Labour and Employment. The Central Government funds 75% of the scheme and the State Governments fund the balance 25%. The State Governments are responsible for implementation.

The Government pays an annual premium of about 400-600 rupees per household to an insurance company, which ensures healthcare and hospitalization cover up to 30,000 rupees per family per year. The RSBY scheme covers five members in each familiy including the head of the household, the spouse and upto three dependents.The insurance covers most diseases requiring hospitalisation. Pre-existing conditions are also covered from day one, with no age limit. Out-patient consultation is free, but the cost of out-patient health care will have to be borne by the beneficiaries themselves. Each BPL beneficiary is required to pay a nominal amount of Rs. 30 per year to cover administrative costs.

The RSBY is a cashless, paperless scheme and comes with a biometric smart card for each beneficiary, containing their fingerprints and photographs. Healthcare is available to the beneficiaries at any of over 5,000 empanelled private hospitals and over 2,000 empanelled Government hospitals across India. The BPL beneficiaries are free to go to any empanelled hospital of their choice anywhere in India based their own priorities of quality, accessibility, convenience or whatever else matters to them. More hospitals continue to be empanelled and these hospitals are required to meet a basic set of guidelines to become empanelled hospitals.

The Government's healthcare strategy

With a clearly defined goal of providing free health care for every single BPL family in a timebound manner, the Government did not think of setting up and running hospitals in every single district or block across the country. If the Government had decided to set up new hospitals across India, a huge amount of capital expenditure would have been needed for setting up the hospitals, besides hiring all the doctors, nurses and other supporting staff. There would have to be an annual budget allocated to run all these hospitals and the responsibility of administering and managing these hospitals would have fallen on the Government. All this would have taken time and by the time the infrastructure was built and made operational, many people would have been denied much needed healthcare for a couple of decades.

The Government wisely chose to focus on outcomes rather than inputs. It took on the responsibility of funding the health care for all BPL families, but chose not to provide the healthcare all by itself. By paying an insurance premium per person to an insurance company, which itself may be either a Government owned or a private Insurance Company, the Government made the insurance companies responsible and accountable for the administration and delivery of health care. These insurance companies bid for the RSBY contracts for every single district across the country. Different companies win the bids for different district and will be responsible for administering the RSBY at the ground level. Only one insurance company is given the contract for an entire district.

The insurance companies in turn work with both Government and Private Hospitals which will ultimately provide the health care to the BPL beneficiaries. The investments in setting up the hospitals will all be incurred by the private sector and the Government may also choose to set up a few hospitals in regions where the private sector doesn't venture quickly enough. The RSBY scheme has put purchasing power in the hands of the BPL families and private entities will respond to that by setting up new hospitals in areas with large number of BPL families to meet their healthcare needs. [Aside: A rural healthcare startup recently announced plans of setting up hospitals that will come up at the block level in rural areas to provide healthcare to BPL families under the RSBY.]

The progress in RSBY so far

22.7 million families have already been covered in just over 3 years time. That is a truly amazing achievement in terms of scale, cost and timelines. Encouraged by the progress, the Government is now considering extending this scheme beyond the BPL families to cover many more persons.

Doing an RSBY in Elementary Education

We need an RSBY kind of approach if we are to provide a quality education for every single child in the country in a time-bound manner. Imagine what can be achieved by replicating this model in Education. There is a simple equivalence between the RSBY model and an Education model.

Healthcare – RSBY Model

Elementary Education

Costs are shared by the Centre and the States, with the States being soley responsible for implementation.

Costs are shared by the Centre and the States, with the States being soley responsible for implementation.

The Government funds

healthcare for all BPL families and refrains from building and managing hundreds of new hospitals.

The Government funds

education for every single child and refrains from building and managing thousands of new schools.

The Government lays down

quality guidelines and regulations for the hospitals that want to get empanelled to provide healthcare to the BPL families.

The Government lays down

quality guidelines, standards and regulations for the schools that want to get empanelled to provide education to children in the country.

With purchasing power in the hands of the BPL families,

private investors will respond to the demand for healthcare and set up and run hospitals all across the country.

With purchasing power in the hands of the parents (of all the children)

private investors will respond to the demand for quality education and set up and run schools all across the country.

BPL families can choose to go to

any of the empanelled hospitals including both Government and Private Hospitals.

Parents can choose to send their child to

any of the empanelled schools including both Government and Private Schools.

The Government pays

premium to the Insurance Company who in turn pay the hospitals,

to cover the costs of healthcare provided.

The Government pays

the school fees for children enrolled in the empanelled schools,

to cover the costs of providing education.

If the Ministry of Labour & Employment can make a huge impact with the RSBY, there is no reason why the Ministry of Human Resource Development can't take a leaf out of the RSBY and come up with a similar project to help us reach out to over 200 million children and ensure every one of them gets a quality Education within 10 years.

I will describe the other three ideas covered in my TED Talk in subsequent posts.

July 16, 2010

Q: So could we possibly see a Bharti University being setup anytime soon? And now you can also bring in foreign partners and collaborate with them.

Mittal: For us education will never be a business and therefore whatever we do will have to be done through grants and contribution from the group and friends. And I don't know whether foreign universities would want to come in for the philanthropy part of it. But we will bring them in at our cost and price but they will not be a foreign university, it should be a Bharti University funded endowed by the contributions that we have made.

In the interview, Sunil Mittal suggests that today's newly wealthy are still a bit insecure about their wealth and also prefer to leave it to their children, which is why there hasn't been much philanthropy yet. But he sees that changing.

Q: How essential is it for business leader at this point in time, especially given the fact that we have these wide differences that exist in Indian society to actually be able to think about things like this, to think about financial inclusion, to think about education, healthcare? How critical is it for Indian businesses to strategies on these fronts at this point in time?

Sunil Bharti Mittal: I will quote from the Prime Minister’s speech in 2007 where he said that the vulgar display of the wealth hurts the sensibilities of this poor nation. I really agree with that. As we create wealth or any business house that creates wealth they have a responsibility of, not only not to display their wealth in a fashion, which is hurting the sentiments, but more importantly start contributing in a very big way.
You spoke about the old business houses and my view is Tatas and Birlas; Tatas continue to do in a very big way even now and the new generation entrepreneurs have started to do this in a big way. So you saw Infosys, Bharti is doing it, Wipro is doing it. In between we didn’t see much happening. Now, people ask why India in corporation not doing enough,. I have a clear proposition for that; one, new found wealth, people are still not very comfortable under their skin that this is here to stay. When you come from poverty struck background, you tend to eat more. Similarly when you have come from difficult situation, you do not have the comfort of parting with your wealth.

Q: So it is the legacy of insecurity that is constraining you from sharing your wealth with everybody?

Sunil Bharti Mittal: Correct. As you get more comfortable, you will start seeing more and more companies joining this bandwagon. The other part that holds Indians back from doing what many in the Western world do is leaving all the money for the children. So people here will cut down a meal for themselves, but ensure that their children are taken care of. Most wealth is left for the next generation, whereas in the US at 18 or 20 small amounts of money they have car for the children and most of the money then goes into building libraries, hospitals, universities. If you see Carnegie Endowment, if you see Brookings, everything has come from endowments here.

Q: Is that the way forward for you as well?

Sunil Bharti Mittal: I am inspired by those. I am inspired by the stories of Rockefeller, Carnegie, I sit on the Carnegie Endowment board in Washington and it is incredible how they left most of their wealth for public causes. I think that has to happen here. So if you ask me what is Bharti Foundation’s vision, to be one day known like a Carnegie Endowment or a Ford Foundation or a Rockefeller Foundation and we have started well. Hopefully we will end well as well.
The Bharti Foundation since 2006 has set up 236 schools in five states. The schools have been set up on land leased to the foundation by village Panchayats. Panchayats that at first looked for the ulterior motive, but have since come around. The government is acknowledging the work of foundation and is now partnering with it to provide free uniforms and midday meals.

The interview also abounds with many other interesting nuggets of information and opinions including their efforts at running over 200 Satya Bharti rural primary schools for underpriviliged children, their support for endowments at IIT Mumbai, IIT Delhi and ISB Mohali, and their views on the changes in Indian laws on education - "I think we are on the threshold of major breakthroughs in the laws of this country around education."

January 06, 2010

Thinking further about the idea of a reality
TV show for school teachers in India, I stumbled on Design Kids, a very interesting
reality TV show on PBS in the United States, to promote engineering concepts to
school children in the age-group of 9-12 years. It would be great to have
something like this in India to promote Science and Engineering to children at
an early enough stage to impress upon them the joy and excitement of science and
engineering.

Here's how Design
Squad, now into their third season, describe themselves,

Design Squad is high-energy, high-drama reality TV that lets kids
show off their smarts as they design and build working solutions for real-world
clients-people who are hungry for clever ideas from a new generation of
innovators. From creating remote-controlled flying football targets for Hasbro
to dry land dog sleds for the Jamaica Dog Sled Team, the action culminates in
the final episode when the top two scorers battle for the Grand Prize: a $10,000
college scholarship from the Intel Foundation.

Design Squad is one of the few places on TV where kids can learn
about engineering. The specific educational goals of the Design Squad
television series, web site and outreach events are to:

Increase students' knowledge of engineering and the design
processDesign Squad will be as hands-on as television can
be. Viewers see Design Squad teams take raw materials and with very
little adult intervention, transform them into workable solutions. The series
presents kids using technology (such as computers, electronics, and machine
tools) to do a wide range of activities that have a scale and complexity that
will excite the viewing audience, and motivate them to do these activities on
their own.

Improve the public image of engineeringDesign Squad presents
viewers with positive role models who experience engineering as a fun and
engaging process.

The image many still have of engineers is the outdated
'nerds with calculators and pocket protectors.' Design Squad goes a long way to
address this. Our diverse cast of high school students are high-energy, smart,
and approach the challenges they face with enthusiasm. And not a single one of
them wears a pocket protector.

Encourage further explorationDesign Squad is more than just a
television series.

The Design Squad Web site extends the concepts
presented on the show and provides viewers with an opportunity to explore
content through the lens of "engineering as problem-solving using science, math,
and technology."

Engineers and educators have partnered with Design Squad
to help support kids as they try out the ideas first-hand. These real world
experiences give kids a stronger understanding of engineering, equip them with
science and math skills, and ultimately lay the foundation they need to
participate in engineering activities later in life.

Their
list of funders and sponsors include the Government, Foundations, Corporations
and the Professional Engineering Associations.

Major funding for Design Squad is provided by the National Science
Foundation, the Intel Foundation, and the Lemelson Foundation. Additional
funding is provided by Noyce Foundation, United Engineering Foundation (ASCE,
ASME, AIChE, IEEE, AIME), National Council of Examiners for Engineering and
Surveying, ASME, the IEEE, Northrop Grumman, and the Intel
Corporation.

December 25, 2009

Private Schools and the Poor: Implementing the 25% in Section 12 of RTE (Right to Education Act 2009) was the focus of the first session. Provided below is a (paraphrased) summary of what each speaker had to say.

Sam Carlson, Lead Education Specialist for the World Bank in India, spoke about the RTE Bill and its implications. A copy of Sam Carlson's presentation is available at the conference web site.

The RTE Bill was passed by Parliament in August 2009, but has not yet been published in the Gazette. It will come into effect only after being published in the Gazette. The RTE Act Rules are being drafted and only after they are ready can it be published. The target date for that seems to be a rolling 3-4 months at any time, whenever you talk to anyone in the Ministry.

The RTE Bill is the first legislation in the world that puts the responsibility of providing elementary education and ensuring enrollment, attendance and completion on the Government. It is the parents' responsibility to send the children to schools in tje U.S. ad other countries. More importantly, this is a justiciable legislation, which means the Government can be taken to court if it does not ensure education is provided to all children.

If the RTE ACT is fully implemented (a big IF), it will be the largest education sector Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the world.

Private Unaided schools will have to admit in Class I, a minimum of 25% of their capacity, students from disadvantaged sections with the Government compensating the schools for the 25%. It remains to be seen how the leading private unaided schools will deal with providing the 25% seats to disadvantaged children.

The implementation of the RTE bill will result in a huge operational research opportunity in terms of the process for selecting the children who will be admitted in each school under the 25% quota, through a randomised lottery.

Interestingly, the responsibility of monitoring the implementation of the RTE Act is not with the Government, but has been assigned to the National Council for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) - an autonomous body set up in March 2007. The NCPCR doesn't have much experience in monitoring something on the scale of the implementation of the RTE Act and they will need to learn as they go along.

There are a lot of regulations imposed on schools by the RTE Act. Schools will have to adhere to specified student-teacher ratios, provide a minimum level of infrastructure, a minimum number of working hours per week and working days per year and so on. All unrecognised private schools must obtain recognition once the Act comes into effect to continue to function after the Act comes into force. If schools don't obtain recognition, they will have to pay a fine of Rs. 1 lakh plus Rs. 10,000 per day. But at the end of it all, one can't legislate teacher effort!

The RTE legislation is very progressive, but the devil is in the details and we need to wait for the rules for implementation that are being drafted.

The private sector has a crucial role to play. Public Private Parternships can leverage the incentive-based drive of the private sector to further public policy objectives (educational outcomes in the case of the RTE).

In the context of the RTE, there are PPP opportunities in a wide range of areas:

Educational services for the state-funded students (25% under RTE) in private schools

The World Bank has allocated US$ 300,000 for monitoring and evaluation of the RTE Act and to help the NCPCR and MHRD in implementing the RTE Act.

Amit Kaushik, a former Director in MHRD who was instrumental in drafting the RTE Bill and the development and implementation of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and currently CEO of Shri Educare Limited (part of the SRF group), spoke on the RTE Bill and its challenges. A copy of Amit Kaushik's presentation is available at the conference web site.

At the time of the Constituent Assembly debates, there was opposition to universal adult franchise since most people were illiterate. Article 45 was introduced as a compromise: "The State shall endeavour to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years." It was the only Directive Principle of State Policy that had a specified time frame for implementation.

The RTE Bill was passed in 2009. Within three years from the date of publishing of the RTE bill in the Gazette, the government will have to ensure that enough schools are established in each neighbourhood to provide education to all. There are various responsibilities for the Central Government, the local governments (maintain records of children upto the age of 14 years, ensure admission of children with migrant families, monitor functioning of schools within their jurisdiction) and the schools (at least 25% of seats).

Likely challenges

Definition of neighbourhood and identification of "disadvantaged groups" and "weaker sections".

Monitoring utilisation of the 25% quota in private schools

Integrating disadvantaged children in upper-end private schools

Expenses over and above tuition fees

Preparing teachers to deal with diverse children

Status of unrecognised private schools

Ensuring quality and learning outcomes

It is unclear if the Private Schools can do a better job than State-run Schools. To quote a study by Educational Initiatives comparing Private and State-run schools,

"...I did find that any lead that private schools show in their learning outcomes over government schools can be completely explained away by...: (1) students socio-economic background, (2) students initial levels, (3) rote/procedural nature of learning tested. In other words, if you control for factor 1, look for improvements between say grade 3 and grade 7 (to nullify any initial advantage) and the test is not rote/testing procedural knowledge only, I do not believe private schools show any advantage over government schools."

ASER 2009 also points to the same thing.

About 7%-9% of schools in the country (around 75,000 schools) are private unaided schools, but they account for 20%-30% of enrollment in the country.

Everywhere else in the world, universal elementary education has been achived only through government schools. So the Government needs to improve its schools rather than letting private schools do more.

PPP in education is possible, but it must be done under the overall supervision of the Government.

The evidence on the effectiveness of the voucher mode is mixed.

Amit Kaushik mentioned that he and Parth Shah of the Centre for Civil Society (had differed publicly in the past on the role of public and private schools in ensuring education for all) and was happy that Parth Shah (the organiser of the conference) had invited him to the conference despite their disagreements.

I later asked Sridhar Rajagopalan, the CEO of Educational Initiatives (who was also present at the conference) about his studies on comparing the quality effect of private and public schools that Amit Kaushik referred to during his talk. Sridhar said that the studies were still going on and are not yet as conclusive as it seemed from Amit's presentation and we should wait before arriving at any conclusion.

Karthik Muralidharan, Assistant Professor in the economics department at the University of California, San Diego, spoke on the issue of the State vs the Market in the delivery of education and its implications for the RTE Bill. A copy of Karthik Muralidharan's presentation is available at the conference web site.

The returns to education come from the quality of education and not the quantity or the number of years of schooling.

Teacher accountability is a key issue. About 90% of spending goes to teachers' salaries and studies have shown that more spending has least effectiveness in the poorest places. The salary levels have nothing to do with reducing teacher absenteeism. In fact teachers are more likely to be absent with higher salaries. Accountability is a big issue, especially when teachers can't be fired for absenteeism.

50% of children in urban India go to private schools. There are more children in private schools in India than in Chile which has a national state-funded voucher program. These private schools are low fee "budget" private schools and not the fancy exclusive private schools. While Teacher salaries in these schools are low, the pupil teacher ratio is higher since these schools hire more teachers and are more responsive and accountable to parents. Students from these schools do better than students from state schools.

The jury is out on the value added by a private school when compared to a government school. Children in private schools are better at the Class III-IV level, since they have usually had two extra years in Kindergarten, when compared to children in government schools who join directly in Class I.

But one should look not just at the difference in quality between private and public schools, but also at the cost-effectivness. whether the same or better results have been achieved at lower costs in private schools or in government schools.

The salary levels of teachers in rural public schools can be as high as 5-10 times that of the salaries of teachers in rural private schools. The highest salaries in rural private schools are less than the lowest salaries in the rural public schools.

The demand for private schools is driven by the failure of public schools and not by the the demand by the elite.

The reason for this lies in the Exit vs Voice dilemma. The market are held accountable by Exit whereas the State can be held accountable only by Voice. Schools combine elements of Exit (can move from state-run schools to private schools) and Voice (community control and collective action).

The credibility of the Exit option impacts the Voice option. Improving the Exit option strengthens the Voice option. The question before us is - should we strengthen Exit, or Voice, or both?

Currently, the richer parents have the option of Exit to a better school, but the poorer parents don't have that option. Poorer parents are also the ones with the least political Voice and so they are doubly handicapped in terms of both Exit as well as Voice to improve the quality of public schools. The Parent Teacher Associations (PTA) don't seem to have an effect on reducing teacher absence in public schools. This could also be a collective action problem. Voice is further weakened in the face of the Exit of the Elite from public schools.

This issue of the poor not having Voice or Exit options can be solved by putting purchasing power behind the poor and then letting the markets respond to the demand. This would provide the poor with both Exit and Voice options. This can be implemented through Vouchers given to parents.

Reservations of 25% or more of seats in schools (through the RTE) could be prone to capture by certain sections of society, whereas vouchers for all will benefit the entire community.

There are concerns about vouchers, which need to be discussed and addressed. Will private schools self-select and continue to remain elite by excluding disadvantaged children even if they have vouchers? Can illiterate parents make informed choices on which schools to go to? Could there be a balkanisation along religious/ethnic lines? Will we in effect be giving up on the public system and letting the government abdicate its responsibility of educating all children?

The case for vouchers shouldn't be looked at as a choice of public vs private, but as a means of increasing competition to improve both public and private schools and ensuring equity and social justice by providing the disadvantaged with choices that today are available only to the well-off.

Many studies are required on the efficacy of voucher programs, the response of private schools etc.. and the 25% provision in the RTE Act will provide an opportunity for many such studies. A study is currently being conducted in collaboration with the Azim Premji Foundation in Andhra Pradesh.

Anders Hultin was a former political adviser to the Swedish Ministry of Schools from 1991-1994. In 1999, he co-founded the private school chain, Kunskapsskolan and was Chief Executive of this company for eight years during which time the company became the largest provider of secondary education in Scandinavia operating thirty-two schools with more than 10,000 students. He is currently CEO of GEMS Education UK. He spoke on the Swedish experience with vouchers. A copy of Anders Hultin's presentation is available at the conference web site.

Sweden is today a country with a population of 9 million and 4000 schools. There were three milestones in education in Sweden

The first was in the mid 1800s - compulsory state-funded elementary education was provided for all

The next was in the mid 1900s - compulsory state-funded education was extended to the secondary level.

The last was in 1992 - the introduction of the voucher model

The introduction of the voucher model was part of the manifesto of the winning political party and was largely regarded as symbolic. But the government was surprised by the very high number of applications to start new private schools, at a time when 99% of all schools were State schools. Anyone who met certain criteria was given the license to run private schools.

The State agreed to pay the same money to private schools that they were paying to the State schools. This amounted to about US$ 7,500 per year. No voucher top-up was allowed - (i.e) private schools were not allowed to collect any more money from the students directly. The private schools had to compete with State schools with equal resources.

From 80 private schools in 1992, there are over 1,100 private schools in Sweden today.

This provides parents a choice forces school operators to respond to the competition and perform better and serve the needs of the parents and society.

There is freedom for private school operators, but with regulation. Information on school operator performance should go to parents. Access to good information can solve the problem of information asymmetry.

While a lot is said about Sweden's voucher model, there is one important point - 75% of all private schools in Sweden are for-profit schools. Without the profit-element there would not have been so many private schools. Most of them would have remained small and largely been religiously oriented. The voucher model would not have existed without the acceptance of for-profit schools.

Take the Carlsson School in Stockholm, fore example. It is a very good private school run by a non-profit charitable trust for over a 100 years. They have a seven year waiting list to get in to the school - you even need to time the birth date of your child correctly and apply on the date of birth! The longer the waiting list, the more reputed the school. Since the school is run by a non-profit trust, there is no incentive for them to set up any more schools. If they had a profit incentive, they would have certainly been striving for growth and would have set up many more schools.

What makes Carlsson School such a good school? It is not the buildings, but the deep understanding of what it takes to run a good school and how to transfer this culture and knowledge from one generation of teachers to another. This is the Intellecutal Property of the School. Had it been a for-profit school, there would have been an incentive and motivation for it to replicate the success of its one school to serve the huge waiting list of children needing education. This would be hugely valuable to society in two ways. One by expanding the supply of high quality schooling. The other by forcing poor quality school operators (both state-run and private schools) who are currently doing an injustice to the lives of so many children, to drastically improve their quality or wind up.

The bottom line for any succesful voucher system is the presence of the for-profit motive. Without that the number of good quality private schools will be limited and will cater only to a small elite.

Prof. R. Govinda, Vice Chancellor of NUEPA, representing the Government point of view chaired the session. He spoke at the end and summed up the first session and responding to some of the comments of the other speakers

We need public spaces in our society and schools are one such public space. We should not let schools become private spaces.

The Government is working on the the draft rules for the RTE Act and is taking its time to ensure that it is well thought through and covers all the various aspects and anticipates all the potential pitfalls. The rules should be published soon.

Unrecognised schools will not be closed down suddenly. They will all be given time and and the opportunity to improve their infrastructure and rise up to meet the requirements of recognition. So there is no need to fear that all the recognised schools will vanish one day leaving a large number of students in the lurch. The Government would not want that to happen.

The RTE Bill is a contract between the State and the School and not the State and the Individual, like in the voucher model. The Government is only agreeing to meet the cost of educating a child if it goes to a State School. If the child goes to a private school, it will not be reimbursed any amount.

The second session was on Graded Recognition System: Positive Regulation and the third session was on Strengthening Government Schools. I will summarise these session too in future posts.